Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to caching systems and, more specifically, to a globally distributed virtual cache for worldwide real-time data access.
Description of the Related Art
As the Internet continues to grow, regions of the Earth separated by vast distances are slowly becoming connected to one another. In the early days of this expansion, telephone lines spanned the oceans and allowed people within cities on different continents to talk with one another. More recently, advanced telecommunications infrastructure has been built that allows more diverse forms of communication to occur. For example, fiber optic cables now span many portions of Earth, allowing the transfer of generic types of data to occur, including voice data, image and video data, computer files, and so forth.
Despite the advances described above, the Internet as a whole suffers from general connectivity issues that interfere with global communication. More specifically, at least three limitations decrease the abilities of users to communicate with one another. First, despite the increasing reach of the Internet, much of the Earth lacks communication infrastructure. For example, unpopulated or “off the grid” regions such as the Sahara or the South Pole are not connected to the Internet, and so visitors to these regions, or pioneers intending to colonize such regions, are faced with limited ability to communicate with the outside world. In many cases wiring these regions is infeasible; in the two exemplary regions mentioned above, the extreme climates associated with those regions generally makes building physical infrastructure impossible.
Second, even when communication infrastructure is present in a given region, a user is required to be within range of an access point in order to access the Internet. An access point could be, for example, a WiFi™ router, a cellular tower, or another type of wireless connection. Alternatively, an access point could be a T1 connection, a digital subscriber line (DSL) connection, or another type of wired connection. In either case, the user must be within proximity to physical hardware capable of communicating with other Internet connected devices. In many countries with established Internet infrastructure, sparsely populated regions exist that remain devoid of access points or have a limited number of access points. Generally, this situation occurs because there is little incentive to provide Internet access to regions that lack a potentially large customer base.
Third, users attempting to communicate with one another across vast distances that are, in fact connected via Internet infrastructure oftentimes experience faulty and/or error-prone communications. Such issues arise because many portions of the Internet depend on unreliable infrastructure. In some cases these issues make certain types of communication difficult or impossible. For example, suppose a person in the North Dakota wished to video chat with another person in Madagascar, thereby requiring video signals to be exchanged between those two relatively remote locations. The pathway between the two people could involve any number of wireless and wired pathways, including cell networks, WiFi™ networks, transatlantic cables, telephone lines, and so forth. Each of these different communication mediums could potentially introduce a different type of distortion and any duration of delay into the video signal. As result, the video displayed to either user might end up choppy, distorted, out of sync with accompanying audio, and/or generally unwatchable.
In sum, the Internet has only limited connectivity. Building Internet infrastructure is some regions is simply infeasible. Other regions lack Internet infrastructure simply because building such infrastructure is not cost effective. Finally, Internet connections between relatively remote regions on Earth are oftentimes of such poor quality that communication is difficult or impossible.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a more effective approach to improving connectivity over the Internet.